Edward Gibson: observation

Transcript context

…That’s fascinating. And so it’s hard to find. There are no areas that we know. I mean, it’s a little overstated right now. At this point, the technology isn’t great, it’s not bad. But we have the best way to figure out what’s going on in my brain when I’m listening or reading language is to use fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging. And that’s a very good localization method. So I can figure out where exactly these signals are coming from, pretty down to millimeters, cubic millimeters or smaller, very small. We can figure those out very well. The problem is the when. It’s measuring oxygen. And oxygen takes a little while to get to those cells, so it takes on the order of seconds. So I talk fast, I probably listen fast. And I can probably understand things really fast. So a lot of stuff happens in two seconds. And so to say that we know what’s going on, that the words right now in that network, our best guess is that whole network is doing something similar. But maybe different parts of that network are doing different things. And that’s probably the case. We just don’t have very good methods to figure that out at this moment. Since we’re kind of talking about the history of the study of language, what other interesting disagreements, and you’re both at MIT or were for a long time. What interesting disagreements there, tension of ideas are there, between you and Noam Chomsky? And we should say that Noam was in the linguistics department, and you’re, I guess for a time were affiliated there, but primarily brain and cognitive science department. Which is another way of studying language. You’ve been talking about fMRI. Is there something else interesting to bring to the surface about the disagreement between the two of you, or other people at this point?…

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